


Dulce et Decorum Est

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Bathing/Washing, Comfort Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Time, Graphic Depictions of Battlefields, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, Some light PTSD talk, Strength Kink, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-22 03:30:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20867477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: “Crowley,” he says, with the face of a man sheltered by his own faith, rainwater running off his lips, “we’ve had some bad weather.”“Oh,” Crowley says over the pouring rain, seeing the whole of him, the missing pieces, the splintered reality, “yes, I think you have.”





	Dulce et Decorum Est

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Wilfred Owen's WW1 poem of the same name (although technically he lifted it from the poet Horace).  
It means, “it is sweet and fitting”.

“I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.”  
― Siegfried Sassoon

Ypres, Belgium  
August, 1917

A heart that technically doesn’t need to beat should not be allowed to break.

But strange things are happening and the world isn’t quite okay and Crowley’s ancient, immortal heart is breaking. It is slamming itself against his ribs and exploding outwards with each beat so loud that it echoes in his ears like thunder— until all he can hear is the ceaseless sheet rain and the sound of his own heartbreak.

_We shouldn’t have left the desert._ The thought hits him with a lightning strike of clarity. _We_ _should’ve stayed there_. Deserts were warm and dry and golden hued and turned at night into a dreamscape of impossible blues and deep shadows— deserts, Crowley had decided, would always be the place that he could return to and remember what it felt like to have everything he ever wanted.

The antithesis of deserts, Crowley thinks, must have been here, in West Flanders. He came here expecting a battle yes, but also embankments, field tents, poppy fields, Aziraphale in his always too-clean clothes. But there is nothing here but the skeleton of dead trees shelled into single standing spinal columns; a hellish moonscape of endless craters filling with water and mustard gas until the air burned a hazy chartreuse hue, like an aging bruise, the entire sky an infected wound. The great limitless horizon filled with nothing but mud and sinkholes, ladders of walkways stitching across the landscape, sutured together, the burnt carapace of tanks sinking into ruin.

And Aziraphale is here—_here_ of all places. They might as well have sent him to Hell. The worst battlefield Crowley has seen and not even a fort to curl up inside, no tents, no fortress, no where to retreat to and miracle himself clean, wash the blood off his hands— just foxholes filling with water, trenches lined with bodies.

_Where are you, angel? Are you hiding? Are you hurt? I am not as strong as you but I will carry you out of this place. I will hide you under my wings to get out of this rain. I will filter the poison gas into my lungs so that you can have clean air._

The trenches run like arteries through the battlefield, men propped up along the walls, sand bags spilling like guts into the dugout. He scans their faces, looking for someone miraculously clean, someone in a jacket that wouldn’t deign to be dirty.

But the trench line eventually ends and there is just a sloping of exploded bulwark walls, a ramp leading up onto the body-strewn bog of Passchendaele.

There is the husk of what used to be a church in front of him, a patchwork pathway of timbers leading to it. A dim light flickers inside, lanterns winking under the deluge of rain. It comes down in sheets, in buckets. It slicks down Crowley’s back, runs under his jacket until he can feel it pooling at the waistband of his pants, can feel it creeping into his boots, flattening his hair to his forehead. It coats his glasses until he cannot see through them, fogging under the humidity, and he takes them off— because who cares if someone will notice the demonic lilt of his eyes when they are already in Hell.

_Who put you here? This is no place for an angel._

There is no inside to the church— its roof is gone, only three walls remaining, filled with men looking like they were birthed from mud. Crowley eyes the threshold, holding his breath, some dorment demonic part of him still weary at the idea of entering hallowed ground. But then he scans the interior, sees the medics in the center, hands pressed over wounds that were more filth than blood. And there in the corner, his hands on a man who had already died, who had already expired despite his best efforts, is Aziraphale.

He can hear Aziraphale’s voice in his head, _just a small skirmish this time. Some minor miracles._

_Fuck You, _Crowley thinks, his heart throwing itself against his ribs, breaking in two, _fuck You. This isn’t part of some _ineffable plan_ this is just mindless cruelty and You are doing nothing to stop it. There is no point to any of this. None of this means anything. Where are Your Great Floods now? Why don’t You just flood this whole field and wash this all away? Go ahead. Keep raining. I’ll wait._

“Angel,” he says, but the sound gets lost in the rain. His legs carry him to Aziraphale; Aziraphale soaked and filthy, his hair caked in mud; Aziraphale small and persistent, his hands still closing the wound on a man who had stopped bleeding a long time ago.

“_Angel_,” he repeats, and this time Aziraphale looks up, his eyes unfocused.

“Crowley,” he says, with the face of a man sheltered by his own faith, rainwater running off his lips, “we’ve had some bad weather.”

“Oh,” Crowley says over the pouring rain, seeing the whole of him, the missing pieces, the splintered reality, “yes, I think you have.”

The church floor may not have burned but the frightened void in Aziraphale’s eyes did. Crowley can feel his heartbeat in his throat, threatening to jump out of his mouth, a mutiny of pain.

He tugs on the hands that are crossed over the man’s chest, “come on, angel. Let’s get you out of here.”

“I can’t leave him.”

Crowley sinks down next to him in the mud, puts his hands over Aziraphale’s on the man’s quiet heart.

“You can. He’s already gone, love.”

The endearment leaves his mouth unbidden. But if Aziraphale hears it it does not register on his face— the only thing there is a shocked blankness, an emptiness that belies their surroundings.

“It’s ok,” Crowley says, shouting over the rain, and slips his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders, “lets walk somewhere we won’t be seen and then we will get out of here, okay?”

There is a silent nod in response, a hand slipping down around Crowley’s waist.

“What time is it?” The angel asks, and Crowley glances at the timepiece on his wrist.

“7 PM,” he says, although it feels like midnight. The sky is a blooming fluorescent cloud of yellow-green and grey, lit by what Crowley is sure is a lowering sun— _somewhere_— and the refraction of smoke and mustard gas, oil fires and lantern lights.

They sink down into the mud beside a dismantled tank, pressed from shoulder to leg, glued together by filth. Crowley snakes an arm around the angel’s shoulder, pulling him close, presses his closed mouth to the top of his head.

“Are you ok?” Crowley asks the muddy hair, knowing the answer, no matter Aziraphale’s response.

The angel nods, mute, looking out into the broken landscape with an empty stare.

“We’re going to get out of here, ok? We will go back to London. The bookshop,” Crowley says, pulling back. He laces their fingers together. Aziraphale glances down at their entwined hands and nods again. “We’ll go together ok? Whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” he says, and lifts his free hand.

“On the count of three,” Crowley says, raising his left hand. The mud sluices off of it. “One, two, three—“

* * *

The bookshop is eerily quiet in comparison to the battlefield— the din of rain still echoing in their ears. The silence is punctuated by the rhythmic _drip drip drip_ of water and mud slinking off of their linked hands onto the rug under their feet.

Aziraphale is breathing heavily beside him. His eyes still closed, his hand still raised in the air.

“We’re home, angel. Everything is okay now.”

Aziraphale nods and unlaces their fingers, toeing off his boots, his eyes still squeezed shut.

“Are you okay?” Crowley asks, taking him by the arm, “Are you hungry?”

There is the slow shake of a head in response.

_ Nonsense, you’re always hungry, angel. Please be hungry. If you’re hungry that means you’re okay._

“Let’s get you cleaned up then?” Crowley offers, shrugging out of his jacket.

“Ok,” Aziraphale snaps his fingers and Crowley feels the sudden peculiar absence of his soaked clothes.

“Uh,” he looks down at himself in just his underthings, miraculously dry.

Aziraphale opens his eyes and glances over at him, “—Oh. That was meant for me. Sorry,” he mumbles, “my head doesn’t feel quite right.”

_Well, nothing you haven’t seen before anyway_.

“Why don’t you get clean. The _human_ way.” He looks up the staircase to the apartment above the shop, “I believe your bathtub just filled itself.”

Aziraphale says nothing, just turns and climbs the stairs, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him. He stops halfway to the top, and without turning around asks softly, “would you come with me? I don’t want to be alone.”

Crowley stares after him for a moment, can still hear his heart pounding in his ears, can still hear the rain on the saturated ground of Belgium.

“Of course,” he answers, “anything you need.”

Aziraphale has the small, cluttered bathroom that Crowley imagines grandmothers must have— filled with tiny glass bottles of various potions, a wide collection of scents, tiny soaps in the shapes of seashells, more towels than any one person had a right to own. Everything is a muted pastel color: sea foam blues, ivory whites, blush pinks. Crowley thinks of his own bathroom at his flat— black and white, purely definitive, only one towel.

Surely he has been in this room before— he must have, to have known that Aziraphale had a claw-footed porcelain soaking tub that is typically filled with books. But perched on the tiny caned stool in the corner and trying to look at anything but the angel getting undressed offered him a view he rarely took before. A view that gave him the knowledge that Aziraphale, for all his fussiness, rarely cleaned the dust off of his windowsills, a view that told him Aziraphale stockpiles not just books but also the toiletries from various hotel bathrooms, a view that told him a soft magpie creature lives here, collecting sundry comforts.

_And You had him on that battlefield._

Crowley grinds his teeth together, hands fisting at his side.

_You didn’t need to send him there. What miracle was he going to do? There isn’t a miracle big enough to save that place._

Crowley can hear the shaky breaths of Aziraphale in front of him, hands trembling as he unbuttons his shirt. He watches the angel swallow, sees his rapidly blinking eyes as he struggles with a clasp.

“Let me,” Crowley says, and stands. “It’s ok,” he murmurs, their foreheads nearly touching, replacing Aziraphale’s hands with his own.

_Do you always get undressed this way? Do you always unbutton your clothes one by one, pare them off in layers?_

“Thank you,” Aziraphale breathes, closes his eyes.

Crowley peels the wet clothes off of him and watches the pale skin appear like it is the most amazing magic trick in the world— like he has never seen the bare back of a man before, has never seen naked shoulders, the swell of a soft hip, the curve of a lovely thigh.

He gets him down to his underthings, a thin shirt, plain boxers, socks that looked suspiciously army-issued.

“These too?” Crowley asks, a flush walking across his cheeks.

Aziraphale nods, distracted, and lets Crowley peel the undershirt off of him. He kneels at his feet, pulls off the wet socks.

“Thank you,” the angel says softly, and then divests himself of his underwear.

He supposes he has seen the angel naked before— he must have, at some point in their six-thousand year friendship, maybe some time before the Middle-Ages, when nudity wasn’t profane. But the Edwardian years seemed long to Crowley, longer than the halcyon days of the Roman Empire, of public bath houses, of eating olives in fabric so breezy it frequently lifted at the mere suggestion of air.

But he has never seen the angel _this_ naked, not this close up— close enough to see where the freckles stopped their sun-cured blooming on his forearms, to see that the hair between his legs is a bit darker than the platinum white on his head, that he has dimpled imprints like the press of two thumbs on his lower back.

It is a difficult thing to keep his breath even, to keep the blood moving through his veins and not between his legs, to swallow back a desire he can’t remember ever being without.

There is still steam rising like tiny spectres from the bath, but Aziraphale steps into it without so much as a flinch, lowers himself down until he is submersed entirely under the hot water and holds still there, an insect suspended in amber. Crowley feels a brief stab of panic when the seconds tick by— and then reminds himself that angels, as it were, don’t technically need to breathe.  
Crowley watches as he rises, the panic ebbing away with the water rolling off of the angel’s closed eyes, thinks of baptisms.

Aziraphale inhales, exhales, his eyes still closed, eyebrows knitting themselves together.

“Why?” He asks.

Crowley sinks down onto the floor next to the bathtub, crossing his arms on the ledge, heart hammering in his chest.

“I don’t know,” he admits, resting his chin on his arms.

“There’s no purpose to any of it,” Aziraphale says, rubbing his face with his hands. “We were out there for a month, getting pelted with rain, shelled by artillery. We blew up the entire field with charges they buried under the earth. For what?”

“Haig is an idiot,” Crowley says, “you never should have been out there.”

Aziraphale slouches back until his head is resting against the back wall, water up to his chin, eyes turned toward the ceiling, blowing ripples out onto the surface of the water. Crowley dips his knuckles under, tracing patterns along the enamel wall.

“I wish I could unsee it,” the angel whispers. “I can still hear everything in my head. I still feel it on my skin.”

_I wish I could tell you that you get used to it, that it eventually goes away. But it doesn’t, not entirely. It stains you. It will rear its ugly head at you when you least expect it. It will haunt you at night when you are alone._

“You’re safe now,” Crowley says, lifting a hand to rub away a smudge of mud on the angel’s temple. The fair head leans imperceptibly into Crowley’s touch, brushing against his knuckles.

_Will this help you? I know it is permanent but I will scrub at the stain anyway. I will clean it until you tell me to stop. I’ll work my fingers raw doing it._

It is a natural thing to lift his hand and thread his fingers through the wet curls, feel the coarse spring of them. There is something surreal, he thinks, about seeing them there— his skin enmeshed with the white hair he has thought so much about, for so long.

Aziraphale closes his eyes at the touch, looking tired and weary and perhaps a bit small. 

“Is there a certain… one I should use?” Crowley asks, nodding at the soap along the radiator shelf.

“The blue one,” Aziraphale says, without opening his eyes.

The blue one smells like lilacs, like springtime, like a time that was far away from where they are now. Crowley remembers this smell from the bookshop’s backroom one night, when Aziraphale bent low to fetch a bottle of wine in front of him, and the scent of the angel made his tongue fork like a serpent’s, made him taste the air to keep it.

There is no difference, Crowley thinks, between the white of the soap suds and the white curls of the angel’s hair— all of it just warm softness under his fingers, like the puff of a dandelion, a cloud in the summer sky.

“Is this ok?” Crowley asks quietly.

“Yes, dear. Much better than just ok,” Aziraphale answers, then pauses and adds softly, “it’s the only thing that feels real right now.”

Crowley rubs his hands along his temples, along the nape of his neck, up and behind the angel’s ears. They rub their way down the sides of his throat, to the tops of his shoulders, thumbs pressing in along the muscle, milking the soreness out of them.

_I have studied every clothed inch of you starting with the very first day of all the days and now here I am, millions of days later—_

The angel’s skin is soft, strangely thin, it feels as though he could tear him open without a second-thought, could reach in and grab whatever essence it is that made him an angel. And he should want to— as a demon. He should long to destroy this round-shouldered, soft-willed, small, ethereal _thing_ that sits before him.  
But Crowley has never been good at being a demon, and when he wraps his hands around the angel’s throat it is to dig fingers into the sore muscle along his collarbones, to pull a sigh out of Aziraphale’s lips.

Then the angel shifts beneath his fingers and a heavy push of muscle greets him from under a plush layer of softness— and Crowley is reminded instantly of that time in a faraway desert not too long ago, when he was carried by this divine strength to a place of benediction.

“It’s about time I took care of you for a change,” Crowley says.

“I doubt my taking care of you ever felt this good,” Aziraphale says, drowsy, clearly remembering bullets and blood while Crowley remembers laying under that desert sky instead, remembers having his world condensed down to the knife-edge of lust, remembers having something that was maybe a bit like what they call love.

“You’d be surprised,” Crowley mutters.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, opening his eyes, “Right.” And the tips of his ears flush pink.

“I should probably be getting out.” He pulls his hands out of the water and looks at them, the wrinkling tips of his fingers.

“Tilt your head back,” Crowley says, lifting the porcelain shower lever off its track, “lets get the soap off of you first.”

The towels are soft, but nearly threadbare, clearly loved and laundered often. Crowley measures whether it would be strange to lift the terry-cloth to his nose and inhale, but Aziraphale takes it from his hands before he has much of a chance to decide.

“Thanks for keeping me company,” the angel says, as if that’s all it was. Crowley thinks of his one towel, hanging in his flat, seldom used, never physically laundered.

“Of course. Don’t thank me.”

“I’m… not sure what to with myself right now,” Aziraphale admits, drying himself off, unconcerned about his own blatant nudity.

Crowley tries desperately to look at anything else, the dusty windowsill, the draining bath-water, the honeycomb tile floor. Six-thousand years and countless shared meals, millions of conversations, thousands of stolen glances, distilled down to this moment in the angel’s bathroom, the object of his eternal desire within grasp, and he was _looking at the floor_.

“What do you usually do after performing miracles?” Crowley asks the tiles under his feet, trying to think of something besides the way Aziraphale’s downy leg hair looks in the dimming sunlight.

Aziraphale pauses, looks out to the golden amber light streaming in through the window, towel hanging by his side.

For a being so obsessed with propriety, so studiously stuffed into bow-ties and tartan, buttoned-waistcoats and modest trousers, the angel had seemingly few qualms about standing naked in front of his hereditary enemy. He absentmindedly dries a bead of water on his hip and Crowley watches as its twin runs down the crease of his hip and disappears into the shadows there. 

“I usually take myself out for tea, bring a book. Mostly I meet up with you, though.”

He turns and fixes Crowley with a split-open gaze— something terribly lonely swimming in the blue of his eyes.

“Well, we already have on thing checked off then,” Crowley says, trying to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat, “why don’t we see about the other two.”

Aziraphale looks down at the towel in his hands, his eyes haunted by things he has already seen. He inhales sharply and wraps the towel under his arms, around his chest, and perches himself on the edge of the bathtub.

“Will I ever not see these things when I close my eyes?”

It feels like he has stabbed a knife into Crowley’s heart.

“_Angel_,” Crowley breathes, closing his eyes.

“I feel like I’m drowning, Crowley. I can still hear them in my head—“ Aziraphale’s voice catches in his throat, his eyes glassy.

“It’s ok, angel. You’re safe now. Nothing is going to happen to you here,” Crowley says, his fingers itching to return to his neck, his ears, to ground him like a lightning rod.

“But _they _aren’t. All those people. So many of them just… _drowned_. In tiny puddles. It was… _godless_ out there.”

Crowley swallows.

“I’m sure you saved as many as you could have.”

“I should’ve done more. I should’ve saved all of them—“

“_How? _You couldn’t possibly. You did the best you could have in a really shitty situation,” Crowley says, “stop blaming yourself, angel. This wasn’t your fight to begin with. They just dragged you there to clean up their mess.”

He can pinpoint exactly the moment that Aziraphale stops listening— because he’s heard what he already knows to be true.

“This wasn’t my fight,” he repeats, staring at the floor between his legs. “This wasn’t _my_ fight… it was _theirs. Hers. _She could’ve done something.”

_Oh no, angel don’t—_

“Is _this_ part of the ineffable plan? All those people dying? _Again_?”

“_Angel_,” Crowley’s voice is low and dangerous, sharp, “_don’t._”

Aziraphale pins him with a wild stare, “Why not? _You _questioned Her. A long time ago. Maybe it’s time _I _did too.”

“_No._”

“Why was I sent there? Was it a test? ‘_How much can Aziraphale blindly follow?_’ How many times do I have to make excuses—“

“Shut up.”

Aziraphale closes his mouth with a snap, staring at Crowley with something akin to betrayal. “So what, _you_ get to question everything but I—“

“_Shut up_.”

Crowley kicks the tiny stool out from under him, sends it skittering away across the tile.

_I will fucking sew your mouth shut you idiot. Do you want Her to hear you?_

_ “_Do you _want_ to end up like me? Shut your mouth.” Venom licks along the edges of his words, a spark of hellfire lighting on the tips of his fingers.

Rage and betrayal burn hot in Aziraphale’s eyes, in the firm set of his narrow shoulders. It transmutes itself quickly however, a silent internal combustion of rage into sadness, the heat draining out of him, an implosion of grief. He catches his head in his hands, elbows on knees, fingers twisting the white curls into a disheveled mess.

“I wish I could pull the stopper on myself, let the basin of me drain out.”

Crowley sinks to his knees in front of the angel, the fear ebbing out of his chest.

“I let them die.”

“You didn’t,” Crowley assures him.

“I think I did.”

“There was nothing you could have done. Angel,” he reaches a hand underneath the stubborn chin, lifts it slightly, the vitriol drained from his voice, “you are incapable of doing the wrong thing.”

Crowley’s own words from lifetimes ago resurface in his throat— _Oh, you’re an angel. I don’t think you _can_ do the wrong thing_.

Aziraphale looks down at him with the kind of vulnerability that makes his nakedness underneath this towel seem shallow, seem ridiculous— his soul laid open in this tiny bathroom.

“How do I stop feeling like this?”

Crowley looks up at him, at this injured bird of an angel, himself surely a wild broken thing too. He knows the yellow of his eyes must be blown completely open, eclipsing the white completely, knows that he is a tangle of limbs in his underclothes on a bathroom floor, knows that the temptations he can offer are temporary and eventually yield to the measures of time— and he knows that despite everything, despite the inherited differences between them, that they were sharing heartbeats in this moment, a perfect mirror of the other, stripped down to an essence that transcended bodies.

“Use me,” Crowley whispers, “let me take it from you.”

He runs a tentative hand up the inside of a thigh, their eyes locked together. Aziraphale’s pupils dilate under the touch, but he does not blink, holding his stare until the room evaporates beyond them.

“I’ll carry it for you,” Crowley says softly, “let me carry it.”

He knows in the abstract that there is nothing beneath the towel, that there hasn’t been a miracling of clothes since he sat on the edge of the bathtub, but it is still something of a shock to run a hand up his thigh and to find only Aziraphale.

He is a heavy, warm weight against his hand, swelling under his touch. Aziraphale’s mouth parts silently, his eyelids fluttering, gazes still locked together. A pink tongue comes out to wet his flushed lips.

“Okay,” he says, and the kick-back from Crowley’s heart knocks the wind out of his chest.

_Okay, okay, okay_

The angel’s voice is a litany in his head— the permission for his desire to be not just a caged thing but for it to be used, to be _useful _even, sends a shock of adrenaline down his arteries, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.

He presses his palms against the inside of Aziraphale’s thighs until they part, the towel falling down until it drapes over the edge of the bath. He can see the angel’s hands digging into the fabric, knuckles turning white, as Crowley takes the length of him in his hand, holds it, and burrows his face into the crease of his thigh.

The warm, honeyed scent of him is concentrated there, and Crowley thinks wildly that he wouldn’t mind it if he were destroyed here, on the spot— the soft belly of the angel pressing into his forehead, his nose nestled into the soft fuzz of his thigh, Aziraphale’s knees pressing against his shoulders. He doesn’t remember what heaven is like, can only recall faint memories, ghosts that occupy attics in his mind— but this, Aziraphale breathing unsteadily above him, this _must_ be close.

Crowley looks up, to see Aziraphale looking down at him, something worried and uncertain lining his face— something scared— and then watches with wonder as the fear disappears with a stroke of his hand.

“_Oh, _Crowley—“

Aziraphale gives a sharp little inhale, surprised— like he wasn’t expecting to find the air harder to breathe with Crowley’s hand around his cock. The sound unravels him— _how long have I wanted to make that mouth say my name?— _sends Crowley’s eyes slamming shut, his mouth pressing hot, open kisses along the length of Aziraphale, his tongue wrapping around him.

The noises the angel is making will be his undoing— he’s sure of it— as he wraps his lips around the warm animal heat of him, sucking him down, his cheeks hollowed out.

He tastes like pure heat, like dew, something sharp and male and powerful. Crowley drinks him down, his lips bruising— having always fantasized about sucking the angel off but never in his wildest dreams ever thinking that it would actually happen.

There’s a rush of blood between his legs, so hard he can barely focus, hazy in the giving of pleasure and the denying of his own. He’s bent in supplication, Aziraphale’s tiny movements above him, his tiny sounds of surrender, the angel’s thighs squeezing against his face.

_I won’t kneel for God but I will kneel for you—_

“Crowley.”

_Always, always._

He gives an answering moan in response to his name, relishes in how the angel trembles under the vibration.

“Crowley—“

He knows what the angel is too polite to say— that he’s close already, that he doesn’t want to assume that Crowley will swallow the end result of his hard work.

“_Crowley_— wait, I’m—“

But Crowley just reaches his arms under the angel’s thighs and grabs at those thumb-shaped imprints on his back, pulling him in deeper to his mouth, a snake unhinging its jaw.

There are hands suddenly in his hair, twisting, a soft belly folding against his head as the angel cups him, holds him tightly to himself, held in suspension along the edge— and then a trembling spill of heat down his throat, an accompanying moan. He swallows him through it, milking him with his throat, suddenly starving.

He could stay there forever— his knees screaming at the hard floor, his cock leaking, trapped in the prison of his underwear against his leg. He eventually lets Aziraphale out of his mouth, rests his sweaty forehead against a warm thigh.

The angel’s hands are still in his hair, softer now, combing through it.

_I love you_, he wants to say, but doesn’t. _I think have loved you for as long as I have known you._

The feeling in his chest is too big— too much. He can feel it swelling under his ribs, pushing out of his pores.

Aziraphale bends over him again, trapping him in the warm embrace of his body, arms cradling his head.

“Thank you,” comes a whisper from somewhere above him.

_Always, always_.

And then a tender kiss is pressed to the top of his head, the tip of a nose nuzzled into his hair.

“Anytime,” Crowley says, and means it. He pulls back from the warm cocoon of the angel’s body to rest his hands on the fuzzy knees cradling him. He catches Aziraphale’s eyes with his own, stares into them, emphatic, “Really, angel. _Any time_.”

Aziraphale nods, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth, looking flushed and voluptuous, a debauched cherub, his cheeks stained pink. He raises a tentative hand to cup under Crowley’s chin, his eyes wide, thumb tracing his swollen lips in wonder.

Crowley turns into the touch, their eyes still locked together, and presses a kiss into the thumb at his mouth.

“You… Your tongue is so _flexible.”_

Crowley can’t help the laugh that comes out of his throat. He presses his forehead into the downy knee next to him, stifling his mirth.

“One of those, _peculiar set of extras_ we talked about in Spain, remember?” He gives the angel a lopsided smile.

“Oh. It’s a snake thing, is it?”

“I suppose,” Crowley pauses, suddenly unsure, running his tongue along his incisors, “does that make it weird?”

Aziraphale slides himself off the edge of the bath until he is sitting on the floor, back against the porcelain sides, Crowley still kneeling between his open knees.

“Nothing about you is weird. Not to me,” the angel says, lifting a hand to card through his cropped hair.

Crowley closes his eyes, wishing that he could suspend this moment forever, capture it in a bottle, a painting on a museum wall.

“Oh— You… Crowley, you’re…”

“Hmm?” Crowley opens his eyes, belatedly, to see Aziraphale looking down into his lap.

“You’re _leaking_.”

“Mm, yeah. It tends to do that.”

“Do you— I mean, should you take care of that?”

Crowley looks up into Aziraphale’s eyes, trying to measure what to say.

“It’d be nice. But… we should get you some food, shouldn’t we?”

Aziraphale chews on his bottom lip, thoughtful.

“I could do it. If you wanted me too, I mean.”

The air suddenly leaves Crowley’s chest, blood rushing in his ears.

“Only if you want— Really, there’s no—“

But Aziraphale is already pushing at his shoulders, laying him down with that fantastical strength, inching out away from the wall of the bathtub.

“Angel, really, you don’t have to. This was just about helping you--“

“Yeah,” the angel says, and licks his lips, staring down at Crowley spread out on his bathroom floor, “I think this will help me too.”

Crowley lays his head back against the cold tile, straightening his legs out from under him, feeling like he couldn’t quite drag enough air into his lungs. There’s a hand under his head suddenly, lifting it to place a folded towel between him and the hard floor.

“Thanks,” he breathes, staring down at Aziraphale at his side, the angel running tentative fingers along the waistband of his underwear.

“Really, angel, we can just go for tea or get a glass of wine if you want—“

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, not looking at him, “shut up.”

“Okay,” Crowley says, and promptly does just that.

Aziraphale tugs at his underwear, threads them down off his long legs. The cold tile is a shock under his bare skin, but he quickly forgets to care as Aziraphale’s hand begins tracing along the divots of hipbones, over the scar that the angel patched up himself.

“This healed well,” he says, running smooth fingers over the jagged line.

“Thanks to you,” Crowley says, watching him.

“You’re so thin,” the angel murmurs, “I must seem so—“

“_Beautiful_.”

Aziraphale looks at him, surprised. Crowley swallows audibly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Crowley says, his face flushing with heat.

Aziraphale gives him a small smile, “like what?”

“Like you’re about to say that I’m _nice_.”

Aziraphale looks back down at him, rubs a square finger into the junction of thigh and torso, making Crowley’s breath hitch in his throat, his eyes squeezing shut.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, dear.”

“Good,” he grinds out, breathing heavily. He _ached_— he had been hard for what felt like an entire year, had leaked an embarrassing amount of fluid onto himself and probably the floor. “Now, if you don’t want that tea then maybe—“

“I’ve never done this before,” Aziraphale says, his fingers petting the brilliant red of the hair between his legs.

“_What_?”

“You know. What you did to me.”

“Oh,” Crowley says, “Well… neither had I.”

Aziraphale pins him with a perplexed look, “really? But I figured…”

“What, as a demon? I was never much of an incubus, angel.”

_And there’s really only one person I ever wanted to do it to._

Aziraphale clears his throat, “Well, you were very good at it.” And Crowley’s head swims with the praise.

“If you don’t like it you can stop. There’s no pressure.”

“I’m not really worried about that,” Aziraphale says, as he dips his head between Crowley’s thighs, “it’s that I’ll like it _too much_.”

_Fuck._

The first touch of Aziraphale’s mouth is like an electric current has been pumped into his veins, his blood replaced with kerosene, with liquid fire. A moan erupts out of Crowley’s mouth, strangled at the sudden release of what feels like an eternity of pent-up lust.

“Yes, yes, oh, angel,” the staccato rhythm of his breathing echoes off the bathroom walls, his head digging into the towel beneath him. Aziraphale is tonguing at the head, lapping at his slit— for not knowing what he was doing, Crowley thinks wildly, he was really fucking good at it.

What Aziraphale lacked in finesse he made up for in sheer eagerness, his rhythm a bit unpredictable, his movements unpracticed, and none of it particularly mattering.

“Angel,” he chokes out. He reaches down and squeezes desperate fingers into Aziraphale’s shoulder, the whole of him ready to lift up, discorporate. He pries open his eyes, needing to see the image before him, to remember it forever, seer it into his grey matter. 

Aziraphale is folded over his hips, one hand wrapped around him, flushed to his mouth. There’s a surprising amount of liquid— the angel’s or his own he cannot tell— around Aziraphale’s mouth, his hand, the base of his cock. The sight rips a broken sound from his lips, feeling like he might dissolve into nothing, burnt up by a lust so large it terrified him.

“Angel—“ he gasps, “hold me down?”

Some animal part of him remembers Aziraphale pinning him to the sand, remembers the buoyant pleasure from being incapacitated by the angel’s hands— surrendering control to his much better half.

Aziraphale obliges, still sucking, hand still moving in perfect time with his mouth. His free arm comes up to wrap around one jutting hipbone, pressing him down into the tiled floor with a startling strength.

“Oh, _fuck_.”

_So fucking strong, you can break me in half, angel, I won’t mind, I’d be happy to be so broken by you—_

The hand at his hip is bruising, ceaseless, the angel exerting a force over him that bordered on cathartic. Crowley writhes under it, pressing into it, wanting nothing more than to be boiled down to the heat between his legs.

“Angel I’m so close.”

Aziraphale moans a muffled, “mmhmm,” in response. The vibration licks down Crowley’s nerve endings, splintering out from hips to legs to toes.

“Angel you don’t— don’t have to—” he struggles to say, trying to piece together a sentence.

Aziraphale suckles him a little harder, a little faster, the edges of Crowley’s vision going black. He pushes ineffectively at the angel’s shoulder, a last non-verbal warning, not knowing if the angel is prepared for what comes next.

“Angel, _Aziraphale, oh.”_

His head drops back, muscles flexing tight, eyes rolling back into his skull. His hips thrust up weakly against the hand holding him down, some latent instinct exerting control. There is a blinding pleasure, an implosion of heat from the warm animal center of him— and then Aziraphale pulling him through it, balls crawling up tight and feeling like they have been wrung dry.

His eyes feel glued shut. He pries them open, swallowing, his throat raw, and lifts his head to look down at himself.

Aziraphale is sitting primly beside him, their thighs mashed together, still naked, licking his fingers.

_Jesus fucking Christ._

Crowley stares at him, mouth hanging open.

_Am I hallucinating?_

“Was that ok?” Aziraphale asks.

“No,” Crowley says, and the angel looks suddenly shocked, “it was _amazing_.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale’s cheeks turn a very fetching shade of pink, his lips swollen and flushed dark, “glad to hear it.”

“I think I’d like that tea now,” the angel says, looking down at Crowley’s body and running his fingers along his thigh. “I’m rather hungry. You weren’t very filling at all.”

Crowley nearly chokes on his shock.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he says, smiling crookedly. “I can treat you to dinner if you’d like,” he ventures, “to make up for it.”

Aziraphale presses a hand into the flat valley between his hipbones, eyes lingering on the scar there.

“That would be lovely,” he says softly.

Crowley reaches down and laces their fingers together, feeling that maybe, for the first time ever, that things were going to be all right.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [Tumblr](https://racketghost.tumblr.com)!
> 
> I really should have made this one huge chaptered story. Because I have no idea when I am going to stop this series and it feels a bit cluttered to have so many parts floating on my Ao3 page, doesn't it?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [This is no place for an angel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22818343) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)
  * [I won't kneel for God, but I will kneel for you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23042680) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)


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